I got several people wanting to send a courier last time I listed something on Facebook. Checking their pages, they were all from eastern Europe with no obvious connection to my city. Good to know the mechanics of the scam, I wondered what they were up to. Don't understand why Facebook couldn't have auto detected the messages though - seemed like a pretty major failure of marketplace that the majority of the messages I got were scams.
It's so easy to spot marketplace scams that I'm baffled people still fall for them.
Are you going to show up with cash on my doorstep (or another agreed upon location)? If yes, we can continue talking. If not, you are blocked and reported. End of story.
Awesome work. Entertaining read. Много поздрави!
Good work!
As noted, it probably won't change anything, but scammers are a lot more sophisticated, these days, than they used to be.
I had a bunch of those whenever I tried to use OLX - both on OLX messages and Whatsapp as well. Bot prevention is 0. I know people who were successfully scammed as they think they are entering their card details to get money transferred by their card number.
If anyone here has done a similar reconnaissance operation - I am curious how much time does it roughly take ?
That's bizarre - someone tried to scam me in a similar way literally a few minutes ago.
I am selling something on a marketplace. Someone contacted me - they want to buy the thing I am selling. Do I still have it? I say yes. They say they are sending a GLS courier to collect the item. I figure they need the item fast - we are celebrating Christmas tomorrow. Why not.
The "buyer" sends me a link to a service supposedly offered by GLS, where GLS works as an intermediary - they collected the money from the buyer; when they collect the item, they will pay me. This is happening in the Czech Republic, and services like that seem plausible here. I do not know every detail of every delivery service offered here. The page looks just like an ordinary GLS page. I am in a hurry. I do not pay that much attention. I pause and check only when redirected to my bank's authentication page (this is the phishing part, obviously). Turns out GLS offers no such service.
I was closer to giving them what they wanted than I imagined possible. I was on autopilot until the last second. Not even my bank's login page surprised me that much - we have something called "bank identity" that lets you authenticate stuff by your bank ID. It is so convenient that I got used to it and I do it carelessly.
>> I hate scammers
Yes, me too.